There has been quite a bit written and talked about lately about an “SEO Bubble” and how long that search engine optimization will remain viable. One of the best posts that I’ve read recently is on a blog called Conversation Marketing.

The issues that seem to be of the most concern is that SEO is pretty simple and that site owners will be doing it themselves, much more than will it go away. I don’t believe that SEO will go away, because if it’s done well it is one the best and most economical ways to bring customers to your site. Even with all of the phoney, fly by night “SEO Experts” out there, most people will learn the difference between good work and bad.

The main concern that has really benn there for quite a while now is that it will move “in house” and individual shops will not have any customers. My feeling here is that while SEO is simple, if done well it’s also quite a bit of hard work. Even is all of the site owners out there know everything about it (still a huge IF) there will be plenty that just would rather pay someone else to do the work well.

Read How the SEO Bubble Will Pop

It’s starting to look like using social media is becoming important to businesses. In the past year I have been reading more and more that having a place on your site where users can freely interact is almost as important as having a site itself.

What that means is that if you are planning to grow your site it is no longer enough to throw your brochure on a couple of web pages and post it on line. You now need a place where your visitors can add their own feedback or share their views of your site in come way. A new study by the Center for Marketing Research at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth shows that the fastest growing companies are learning this and adding blogs, forums, wiki’s. etc. at a rapid pace.

This also means that you can’t just throw up your site and forget it. You need to add new content, as well as, monitor your social pages. You have to watch for undesirable posts, but you also need to know what your visitors are saying about you. What you are doing well and perhaps more importantly what you are not doing well.

Social Media in the Inc. 500: The First Longitudinal Study

Want to hear why traditional media just doesn’t get it when it comes to blogging?

Have a look at this post on The Viral Garden called New York Times shows how out of touch it is with bloggers.

It’s not just the media that doesn’t get it either. Established businesses think that they are getting into the game of social and email marketing just send out their ads in hopes that they will be read and passed along. They don’t really get it that they are just annoying their customers, not trying to help them find or do what they want.

Read – New York Times shows how out of touch it is with bloggers

One of the things that I mention to my clients that want to start a blog and allow others to add content to their site is that besides blog spam you probably will get some commenters that don’t like you or what you say. I usually say that instead of just deleting the negative comments the best policy is to let the comments stay and just honestly answer their criticism.

By allowing their comments and then answering them you look like you are not afraid of talking about all aspects of your business. Just about everyone knows that no matter how good you are you can’t please everyone. So a blog that doesn’t allow any negative comments will apprear strict and censored. Open conversation not only makes you look better and fair there’s a good chance that if you keep an open mind you can learn from complaints. I have always believed that listening to a couple of honest complaints can help you improve your business much more than a thousand praises.

Of course on your own site you do have the option of just deleting negative comments, but what can you do if they are not on your site? I recently read a great post on the aimClear Search Marketing Blog by Marty Weintraub that really offers some great ideas about what you can to to help you recover and even benefit from damaging negative comments about you or your business posted on the web.

Read Reputation Crises Management: 8 SEO Triage Tips

My last post on Viral Marketing was pretty well received so I thought I would follow it up.

You hear quite a bit about viral marketing in my business these days. Like the old shampoo commercial it used to be that “they told two friends and they told two friends and so on…”

What has happened lately is that the two friends that you told may be able to tell two thousand “friends” and so on…

Mass communication has never been easier. I read on a Search Engine Guide Blog post recently that of all online users

• 89% share by email
• 24% share business or personal finance info
• 63% share content at least once a week
• 25% share daily
• Only 5% won’t share at all

I’m not sure where these numbers came from, but if they are true it seems to me that if you can create something that people like that they will pass it around. Once that starts it can just keep getting bigger by leaps and bounds.

The big trick is to find something that speaks well about your brand that people will want to pass along. Have a look at your own inbox. Does anyone ever pass along a something that is obviously just an ad for a business? It rarely happens and when it does it is usually a funny video that can be enjoyed by someone who is not interested in what they have to offer.

Here’s what I have found to be the things that get passed around the most:

• Funny and entertaining – You need to be sure that any joke is at your expense. If you make fun of someone else (even a competitor) it will come back to haunt you.
• Educational – There are probably plenty of things that you can teach. Some free advice that can benefit most anyone.
• Warnings – These can be true or not. I would stay away from this one unless you relate it to the Educational type above. For example if home burglaries are on the rise and you offer an alarm system or some other deterrent. Be careful if you do this because an untrue warning or an extreme alarm could again be harmful to your campaign.

You want your company to be seen in a positive light without being too self promoting and that’s a fine line to walk.
To find out more about this see this article on the Search Engine Guide Blog by Diane Aull

Read – Unleashed Viral Marketing Workshop

.

One of the things that I like to mention to my clients trying to promote their site through “Viral Marketing”.

We have all heard the expression “they told two friends and they told two friends and so on and so on…”

The Internet can be the perfect medium for this kind of promotion, except on the web it can be “they told two thousand friends and they told two thousand friends…”

Unfortunately with anything that big and moving that fast it can be almost impossible to control. So some of the big questions can be…

• How do you start something that’s good being said about you?
• How do you keep the buzz positive?
• How can what’s being said actually help you?

I found a good ebook that helps answer these questions and more. It’s being offered for free by Wordpreneur.com and I would recommend downloading it and giving it a once over. This Ebook comes with full re-distribution rights. You can sell it, include it in a membership site, or give it away as a bonus gift from your own website.

Read Viral Marketing Unleashed

.

I think that an email newsletter is a wonderful way to build your business.

You could do it the easy way and hire me to design and run your campaigns or you can do it yourself.
Either way an email marketing blitz is inexpensive and can still be one of your most effective marketing tools.

There are some important rules for starting any email campaign

• Your own list
• Opt-In only
• No Spam
• Post your old newsletters
• No Blasting

Post your old newsletters

It is always a good idea to post your newsletters on your site.
This will do at least two good things for you.

1. It will get you new content. That’s one of the best thing that you can do for your site to raise your rankings in the search engine results pages. Plus it will give you many new keywords that you can be found for in the search engines.
2. t will give your potential subscribers an idea of what they will be getting when they do sign up. That will make your newsletter even more powerful because you will be getting subscribers who read what you have and request more.

You can have a newsletters section on your site or a way to do it for my customers who want to do it themself would be to create a blog category named “newsletters” and post your email newsletters in that category. You can place a link from your newsletter sign up page that goes to this category. That way the link will always go to the most current editions. This is also a good page to link to in the header of your newsletter for those readers that are unable to view your email newsletter.

Well, that’s the end of my little mini-course, but there’s so much more to learn, many things that I may have missed or just glanced over and email marketing is changing all of the time. I invite your comments, techniques and opinions. and if you would like to learn more..

I can highly recommend emailexperience.org

.

I think that an email newsletter is a wonderful way to build your business.

You could do it the easy way and hire me to design and run your campaigns or you can do it yourself.
Either way an email marketing blitz is inexpensive and can still be one of your most effective marketing tools.

There are some important rules for starting any email campaign

• Your own list
• Opt-In only
• No Spam
• Post your old newsletters
• No Blasting

No Spam

You might think that “No Spam” is all about yesterdays post. That if you only have a opt-in mailing list you provide an method to opt-out and you have your name and contact information in your newsletters that you are not sending Spam and technically you are correct. I have a bigger definition of Spam. I believe that if I sign up to receive a newsletter and it is all ads and promotional material with no other good information it’s still junk even if I asked to receive it.

Unfortunately many site owners just want to know what’s the easiest and cheapest way that they can “blast” their advertisements to as many people as possible.

It’s important to remember here that your subscribers are guests of your site who were looking to see what you can do for them. They are hoping that you will provide them a way to make their life easier or maybe just to entertain them a bit. If you do that they will allow you to promote yourself and possibly even help you, but if all you send is advertising it will be ignored and what could have been your most valuable resource will simply unsubscribe or block your mail.

It is also true that in these days of email filters more and more email is being blocked and deleted. Many times the sender doesn’t even know it. The more images that you include in your newsletter the more it looks like spam to the filters.

In addition did you know that most major online email clients (Yahoo, Google, Hotmail) will block your images by default? The best way to get your message through to your readers is to not look like Spam. Just a few pictures and lots of text. Have good descriptive alternate text to describe your images so readers will know what the pictures are if they can’t see them. Be sure to provide a plain text version of your email to users who can’t get html email and provide a link to a page on your site where the reader can go if the email is unreadable.

The main thing that I want to stress in this post is that you don’t get to decide if your email campaign is spam or not, the folks on the receiving end get to decide that. Don’t give them an excuse to block your mail.

Tomorrow – Post your old newsletters

I think that an email newsletter is a wonderful way to build your business.
You could do it the easy way and hire me to design and run your campaigns or you can do it yourself.
Either way an email marketing blitz is inexpensive and can still be one of your most effective marketing tools.

There are some important rules for starting any email campaign

• Your own list
• Opt-In only
• No Spam
• Post your old newsletters
• No Blasting

Opt-In only

It may be tempting go add the names of everyone that you can find to receive your newsletter, but the best way to go is to have your visitors ask to be placed on your mailing list.

It is important that you make sure that the option to opt-in to your newsletter is prominent, easy to use and on every page of your site, but the only way most people will subscribe is if you offer them something that they really want to receive.

In the case of yesterday’s free samples, where you are requiring the visitors to fill in all of the fields in a form in order to get their sample, I would advise to have an unchecked checkbox for your newsletter subscription.

Some people will say you should have the box prechecked so you get as many subscribers as possible, but I believe that you should make it as easy as possible to let your visitors add themselves to your list, but they should never have to opt-out.

You may say that this kind of thing is just petty, but I believe that it’s usually the small things that you do (or don’t do) that let your visitor know that you are not going to take advantage of their trust. You will definitely get fewer names on your list, but the ones that you get will be your best resource, your fans, so to speak.

When you do send them something they feel is worth passing along they will do so with a recommendation and some passion and that will best help you promote your newsletter, your site and your products and services.

Tomorrow – No Spam

.

I think that an email campaign is a wonderful way to build your business.
You could do it the easy way and hire me to design and run your campaigns or you can do it yourself.
Either way an email marketing blitz is inexpensive and can still be one of your most effective marketing tools.

There are some important rules for starting any email campaign

• Your own list
• Opt-In only
• No Spam
• Post your old newsletters
• No Blasting

Your own list

Your own list of customers and visitors who have asked for your newsletters are by far your most valuable resource. These are your core business. Very few, if any, lists that you can buy will give you people who are specifically interested in what you have to offer.

The main goal of a newsletter is to get people to actually receive, open and read your email. This is called deliverability. The best chance of this happening is to have recipients who want and have asked for your information.

One of the best ways to get your visitors to sign up is to offer them a gift. It’s pretty easy to offer something to download like a great report, helpful tips or perhaps an ebook that you have written or purchased the distribution rights to. These gifts can be presented as very valuable even though they don’t cost you anything or very little.

Another way to go is to give away something that costs you more. One of my customers Melosleep tried a limited time promotion where they gave away a free sample of their product to anyone who filled out a form. The freebie sites passed their offer around and in a very short time they had a huge amount of requests. It was expensive, but they built up a very large in house mailing list quickly.

A huge list can also be another expense as most web hosts will limit the amount of email any one account can send in order to keep the spammers out. For example this site is limited to sending 100 emails per hour max. There are programs like PHPList that will limit how many emails that it sends an hour, but if you have tens of thousands of names it would take weeks to send one newsletter.

In that case you probably need to use a commercial email sending (or hosting) company. A company with a good reputation so your email doesn’t get blocked even before it gets to your reader as being from a spammer.

Tomorrow – Opt-In only

.